The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, broadband data communications services from geosynchronous orbit. Market demands for such spacecraft have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on spacecraft payloads. For example, broadband service providers desire spacecraft with payloads offering dynamically scalable data rates to a large number of user terminals.
A multi-beam antenna (MBA) system generates a set of user spot beams that define a coverage area which may extend, in aggregate, across a large region on the ground. Within any given spot beam, a large and dynamically varying number of user terminals may be simultaneously demanding system resources (bandwidth or other antenna beam resource). Moreover, the demand from any individual user terminal will vary temporally and/or spatially as the user terminal experiences variations in signal to noise ratio (SNR) and/or (for a mobile user terminal) moves about within or between spot beams.
Optimization techniques applied to the problem of bandwidth allocation are disclosed, for example by Iiduka, et al., in “Fixed Point Optimization Algorithms for. Network Bandwidth Allocation Problems with Compoundable Constraints,” by Goode, U.S. Pat. No. 6,718,552, and by Kelly, U.S. Pat. Pub. No. 20010043575, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety into the present patent application.
The above mentioned techniques attempt to optimize network bandwidth utilization, but do not necessarily optimize the experience of the users (customers). As a result, an improved approach to dynamically assigning bandwidth or other system resources to user terminals is desirable.